Photographer Page

Harriet Chalmers Adams

In this image from 1909, two women chat at a market in La Paz, Bolivia. Writer and photographer Harriet Chalmers Adams wrote in the accompanying story, "If La Paz is a peacock, the market place is its tail."

A mestiza girl in a white bowler-style hat, a headpiece often worn by indigenous Bolivian women, turns and poses for a portrait in La Paz, Bolivia.

An Araucanian man stands in the middle of a graveyard in Chile.

In 1917, Harriet Chalmers Adams was the first female journalist invited to visit the French frontlines of World War I. In Belgium, she recorded a soldier bandaging a Red Cross dog's foot.

Adams published more than 20 stories for National Geographic magazine. In this photograph, a man guides his llama herd to La Paz, Bolivia, around 1909.

Adams and her husband, Franklin, traveled 40,000 miles across Latin America a few years after they got married. She continued to be drawn to the continent, and later, around 1922, photographed this Araucanian family in southern Chile.

A woman working for the war effort helps operate a street car in Lorraine, France.

A close-up of the French front line shows the rare access that photographer and writer Harriet Chalmers Adams had during World War I. “There is no reason why a woman cannot go wherever a man goes—and further,” she told a newspaper in 1920.

A Peruvian local sits atop the Incan fortress of Saqsayhuamán overlooking Cusco, Peru.